Social Justice Starts at Home, and at Church

One Sunday when I was about four, after we got back from Mass my mother made dinner and ate with me and my sisters, and then went to her room to lie down. A few years earlier, my fireman father had been killed in a firetruck accident. His death had left my mother alone with  three little girls, a 2 year old, a 1 year old, and a baby born the month after his death. I was the oldest.  

My mother’s family was half a continent away, and she was alienated from my father’s family. We were barely getting by on a small fireman’s pension. At the time, we lived in a low-income housing project in Jamaica Plain, an incorporated township in Boston, Massachusetts. 

When my mother got up, she was shocked to see I was not in the apartment. My sisters were in the living room happily playing together without me, as usual.

My mother found me outside sitting on a bench in the concrete yard in the hot summer sun, where I was giving away money from her purse. A small crowd had gathered around when word got around what I was doing. I told everyone, “Jesus said to give all you have to the poor. They said that in church today.” My mother quickly checked her wallet and found to her relief the dollars were still there. Since my mother had given me small coins every Sunday to put into the collection plate, I knew coins were money by then.  I think I was young enough not to know that dollars were money, because I wasn’t giving the dollars away. She explained to the beneficiaries of my largesse that I had made a mistake, and people started giving back the change I'd given them.

She smiled at me and said Jesus didn’t mean I should give away all her money. She didn’t state the obvious to me, that by objective measurements, we were the poor. 

At around eighteen years of age, I left the Catholic Church, and then I came back to belief in Christianity at around thirty-one, after a divorce. At the time I was living in Minneapolis. Because my ex-husband stopped paying child support and didn't pay alimony, I applied for welfare to support me and our two children and took advantage of some generous social programs that paid for my child care and made it possible for me to work on completing my college degree. (Those programs have long ago been cut.) 

After I paid the rent and bought food stamps, I had only about $40 a month to pay for everything else: clothing, soap, transportation, my children’s school supplies .  .  ..  Like my mother had been, I was all alone. And I was additionally impoverished without the help that Catholic faith can give.

Providentially, during this hard time, I was helped back to faith in Christ because I was invited to a Bible Study and prayed for by a fundamentalist Christian fellow student who I'll call Jane. Jane and her fellow Christians took literally Christ’s instructions at the end of the gospel of Mark to go out and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. 

The opinion of some biblical critics—that the “great commission” ending was tacked on by the community that supposedly wrote St. Mark's Gospel, and that those words may not be reliably attributed to Jesus—would have left Jane and the other evangelical Christians at a loss. Without Jane's literal belief in the words of Christ, I would not have been drawn back to faith by her eagerness to share the Gospel and thereby follow what she personally believed that all Christians had been instructed to do by Christ. And so it happened that because of blessed literal mindedness of that dear young woman, the poor (me and my two children) and many others had the gospel preached to them.

Then later I joined an evangelical Free Church who sent volunteers out as part of a Busing Ministry. They went door to door to invite unchurched people to their Sunday services, and so I boarded their bus with my kids. In my experiences there and at other Bible-believing churches, I found they took almost all of the words in the Bible pretty literally. 

And so I was surprised at how they reacted one Saturday morning when a homeless man wandered into the church.  I was there for a women’s Bible study. Some older women and men, deaconesses and deacons, were preparing for an elders’ lunch meeting. A strange man with unkempt black hair and a ripped green Army jacket, American Indian from the looks of him, probably Ojibway because they are the largest local tribe in the area, walked into the church basement and his big frame filled the doorway to the kitchen. 

The deacons and deaconesses were cutting up slabs of Jello embedded with canned pear halves and setting the jiggling green squares out for serving on iceberg-lettuce-lined salad plates. Chicken pieces were roasting in big pans in the oven in a sauce of cream of mushroom soup. The strange man asked for money for food.  

I was shocked at their response: one of the deacons slipped away to the phone in the pastor’s office, called the police and within a few minutes, the police had taken the stranger away.  Let me show what I think they should have done instead and why.

Evangelicals don't follow the liturgical year, of course. So, the pastor would get up every Sunday irrespective of the season of the year and preach from the Bible, starting each time where he had stopped the week before. Not too many weeks previously, we had all heard him talk on these words from the letter of St. James about how to treat a poor man in filthy clothing:

My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory with partiality. For if a man with a gold ring, in fine clothing, comes into your synagogue, and a poor man in filthy clothing also comes in; and you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing, and say, “Sit here in a good place;” and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool;”  haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?  Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which he promised to those who love him?  But you have dishonored the poor man. . . .  However, if you fulfill the royal law, according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. . . . [If] you show partiality, you commit sin.—James 2: 1-3, 5-6a, 7-9

If they took the words of St. James literally, I would have expected the evangelicals to invite the poor man to join them for lunch. This would not be comfortable. There would be dangers. To do something like that is foolishness, but our faith as a whole is foolish, as St. Paul said.

After I was safely back in the Catholic Church, I remembered that incident where the evangelicals had not welcomed or fed the stranger, when I went to a Seder supper sponsored by a parish I attended in Milpitas, California. By that time I had finished my education, I had become a technical writer. Sun Microsystems had recruited me and paid to move me from Minneapolis to work in Milpitas. I had joined the local parish church, but I had not been welcomed there. I was used to not finding community in the Church by then. But it was still hard because I craved it so badly. What made it worse is that I was in a new part of the country and had left my friends and some family members behind in Minneapolis. I was a stranger, and nobody took me in. 

Being welcomed didn't seem an unreasonable thing to expect when I'd read about how the members of the early church shared everything with one another, and how we are all equals, brothers and sisters in Christ. I couldn’t help but be a little jealous at the Seder supper that the pastor only talked to the mayor and his wife. Nobody at the table at which I sat was even polite enough to show any interest in me. And when I asked questions to try to draw them out, they gave short, curt answers, and acted as if I was weird for trying to talk with them.  

Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke extensively (for example here and here) about how we have a unique kind of poverty in our society, the poverty of loneliness. Making Silicon Valley wages as a technical writer, I was no longer financially poor. But I still had the kind of poverty Mother Teresa described. 

Maybe not all of us are called to live the radical poverty of Christ the way St. Francis of Assisi and others like Dorothy Day have done. But we all have to take what He taught seriously and find ways to become his true followers. We have to be ready to answer Him at the Last Judgment when He asks us, not if we were Church goers, but whether we clothed Him, fed him, visited Him when He was in prison, cared for Him when He was sick, buried Him when He died. 

Even though He didn't mention keeping the commandments, it was clearly understood, since He said elsewhere, "If you love me, keep my commandments." 

It goes without saying, doesn't it? that— without chastity—holiness and effective works are impossible. And of course need to be in a state of grace in order to perform works of love for others. So, of course, we need to worship God on Sundays and receive the Eucharist at Mass as often as we can.

Jesus also said, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. —John 13:35 

Social justice starts with personal justice. Personal justice includes following traditional teachings about how we honor our commitments and take care of others around us. Do we use people outside of marriage for selfish pleasure and drop them when we have no use for them? Do we keep our marriage vows? Do we give selfless faithful love to our spouses? Do we make sure that we give all the attention and guidance our children need? Do we take care of our parents and honor them? 

Taxpayer-funded programs to help the needy would be much less needed if we all gave love and care to the family members God has given us to love.

And shouldn't we be doing what we can to make sure nobody feels left out in our Church family? Do we include fellow Catholics we see in Church social groups even when we have no use for them or they don't appeal to us?  

We don't have to like people to love them. And we may find that we do like them if we love them enough to get to know them.  

Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Theresa) often told people who wanted to come and help her in Calcutta,  “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in homes and in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society — completely forgotten, completely left alone.”

None of Jesus' commandments have an exception clause that we should do these things only if the other person is pleasant or attractive.  Jesus just said that whatever we do to the least of His children we do unto Him. He didn’t say, do these things unless they don’t appeal to us or unless they don't deserve it.